Weekly Poll: Do You Use Photo Stream?

Last year, one of the newest features Apple announced for the iOS and iPhoto was Photo Stream, a simple way to get the pictures you take on the go on your Mac. If you have an iPhone and take pictures all the time, but want to keep them on your Mac, it’s a great service … provided you don’t take more than 1000 pictures before syncing with your Mac.

It’s an interesting way to keep your pictures synced along with the rest of your files with iCloud, but most of us have many different ways we sync data already. From Dropbox and other online storage apps to social networks where we usually share photos directly already, there’s a ton of ways to get your pictures off your phone without syncing or using Photo Stream.

More interesting, though, is that Photo Stream could work just between two Macs, or a Mac and a PC with iCloud installed. That way, your most recently imported photos are on all of your devices, even if you don’t have an iPhone.

So do you use Photo Stream on your Mac? Do you find it very useful, or could you just as easily use something else? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

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Responses

I can’t I use it, but rather it uses me. It’s on by default and can’t easily be repealed. With an iPhone, iPad, and three Macs, I’m actually quite scared to try and disable anything related to photo sharing for fear of losing my library, or even the recent images.

The system is very messy, and when I get a new camera, I’ll go back to shooting-and-downloading photos in a more straightforward, albeit slower, worlflow.

Blair Barkley

December 12th

I would like to, but since the latest Apple TV (2nd Gen) update about a month ago, it no longer works. I can’t for the life me to get it to work. I’ve tried everything except call apple support, but haven’t yet because it’s not that important.

Doug

December 12th

Handy for sharing photos within my extended family. Yes Dropbox or Facebook would work but my son is too young for FB and my elderly mother isn’t interested. Yet we all have iPhones or iPads. iCloud sharing works well and allows comments and ‘likes’.

I use it regularly and, oddly, found it to be more reliable on Windows than on Mac. On Mountain Lion I sometimes need to open iPhoto to make it load even quite old photos I took with my iPhone. On Windows they’re on my laptop almost as quickly as advertised.

Luke

December 13th

I don’t use photo stream anymore since adobe Lightroom has replaced iPhoto on my mac. Since importing through iPhoto is nonsense, I use Dropbox for sync.

However: I would like to see a Lightroom plugin capable of using photo stream ;) or is there already one? I probably should take a look around :)

Ian C.

December 13th

I have Photo Stream active on all devices, but I don’t use it to sync, I have auto download/upload turned off.
I use Photo Stream to wirelessly get pics from iPhone to MacBook, but my primary use is to deliver recent pictures to the Apple TV screensaver.

John

December 13th

I don’t use it simply because I don’t want my phone automatically hijacking my already limited 2GB of data each month.

Nor Oh

December 14th

I use it regularly. My mom isn’t on Facebook and my sister lives in China. Photo Stream is the only way I can sync photos from our family events to their iPads into well organized albums without them doing anything other than accepting my email invites.